Kicking while she's down

Vanity Fair has a BIG SCOOP coming out in the next few days in the form of a lengthy piece "written" by Levi Johnston on his former-almost-mother-in-law. I have nothing but disdain for the entire thing, including the gossipy tidbits that Vanity Fair has leaked so far, and I think Michael Scherer hits the nail on the head here:

He paints the Palin family in a withering light, one that appears based in fact, but is of questionable public value. Does it matter that the Palins may have slept in different beds, or that Sarah Palin did not make dinner, or asked her children to rent her videos from the store, or that she proposed adopting Johnston's child, or that she seemed depressed after the election and talked about the need to make more money?

You know, if this were ten months ago, and Vanity Fair was publishing this kind of nonsense, I think I would've been okay with it. You know, politics is beanbag, and all that. Sarah Palin is an unqualified nutcase, and if marginalizing her to the status of tabloid superstar would have been enough to push her away from the White House, then marginalize away. With some distance between me and the more hysterical 2008 incarnation of myself, however, it leaves me profoundly uncomfortable. What, precisely, is the point here? If you watch the video attached to the Vanity Fair teaser, which I only managed to get a couple minutes in to, you get long, unedited shots of Levi, looking confused and unhappy as a number of photographers and make-up artists prepare for him to walk off the edge of a building. Is that the point? To permanently drive a stake through the Palin family, at the expense of Levi's son? To ruin Levi's life by drowning him in an ungodly sum of money that he is too young to spend wisely and too young to refuse?

Palin is doing a perfectly cromulent job ruining her own 2012 chances, and it is incomprehensible to me that anyone could make the argument that more dirt needs to be dug up or mud slung at her. There is no political value in continuing to rip into her family like this; if anything, it has backlash potential written all over it. I suppose it was inevitable that someone would pay Levi to give some tell-all love to them, and it will undoubtedly sell millions of copies, but it is appalling that Vanity Fair, which has already devoted so so much ink over the last year to tearing Palin apart in much better ways, would drum this thing up. This is a political hit piece with no political purpose, just malice.